Vanishing Treasures

Description

From the award-winning author Katherine Rundell comes a “rare and magical book” (Bill Bryson) reckoning with the vanishing wonders of our natural world

The world is more astonishing, more miraculous, and more wonderful than our wildest imaginings. In this brilliant and passionately persuasive book, Katherine Rundell takes us on a globe-spanning tour of the world’s most awe-inspiring animals currently facing extinction.

Consider the seahorse: couples mate for life and meet each morning for a dance, pirouetting and changing colors before going their separate ways, to dance again the next day. The American wood frog survives winter by allowing itself to freeze solid, its heartbeat slowing until it stops altogether. Come spring, the heart kick-starts itself spontaneously back to life. As for the lemur, it lives in matriarchal troops led by an alpha female (it’s not unusual for female ring-tailed lemurs to slap males across the face when they become aggressive). Whenever they are cold or frightened, they group together in what’s known as a lemur ball, paws and tails intertwined, to form a furry mass as big as a bicycle wheel.

But each of these extraordinary animals is endangered or holds a sub-species that is endangered. This urgent, inspiring book of essays dedicated to 23 unusual and underappreciated creatures is a clarion call insisting that we look at the world around us with new eyes—to see the magic of the animals we live among, their unknown histories and capabilities, and above all how lucky we are to tread the same ground as such vanishing treasures.

Beautifully illustrated, and full of inimitable wit and intellect, Vanishing Treasures is a chance to be awestruck and lovestruck, to reckon with the beauty of the world, its fragility, and its strangeness.Praise for Vanishing Treasures:

“A rare and magical book. I didn’t want it to end.”
—Bill Bryson, author of The Body and A Walk in the Woods

“This world, even  as we degrade it, remains almost unimaginably beautiful and interesting, as this remarkable bestiary makes clear. Here are a bunch of very very good reasons to actually try and hold on to as much of the Pleistocene as we can.”
—Bill McKibben, author The End of Nature

“A wondrous ode to nature’s astonishing beauty—and an elegy for all the life we are in the midst of destroying.”
—Amia Srinivasan, author of The Right to Sex

“Exquisite and timely.”
—Maggie O’Farrell, author of The Marriage Portrait

“A total miracle.”
—Max Porter, author of Shy

“A loving and lovely book.”
—Sarah Moss, author of Ghost Wall

“A witty, intoxicating paean to Earth’s wondrous creatures . . . shot through with Rundell’s characteristic wit and swagger.”
—The Guardian

“[A] dazzling collection of essays about some of the world’s most wondrous creatures. From the iridescence of the golden mole to parasites in the eye of the Greenland shark, Rundell details the natural world in exquisite prose…Rundell’s gift for language, wit and historical observation combine here to create a rare and beautiful book.”
—The Observer

“There is a constant joy in the book . . . A sense throughout of delight and wonder, and a reminder that these emotions also matter—may even save us. This is the point.”
—New Statesman

Praise for Katherine Rundell:

“Katherine Rundell is a phenomenon.”
―Neil Gaiman

“Brilliant…Supernaturally talented.”
―Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Rundell is the real deal, a writer of boundless gifts and extraordinary imaginative power.”
—The Observer

“I love Katherine Rundell’s writing because it’s so fresh and vigorous, and always so unexpected…A writer with an utterly distinctive voice and a wild imagination.”
—Philip Pullman, author of The Golden Compass

“Rundell is an astonishing young talent.”
—The Daily MailKATHERINE RUNDELL is a Fellow of St Catherine’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and Why You Should Read Children’s Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise. Her multi-award-winning novels for children have been translated into more than forty languages and sold over two million copies worldwide. She has written for, among others, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, the New York Review of Books, and the New York Times, about books, the natural world and night climbing.US

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